


In Which Vriska Gets What She Wants

by NonPlayerCharacter



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen, Speculative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-31
Updated: 2011-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-22 00:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NonPlayerCharacter/pseuds/NonPlayerCharacter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>but not in the way she wants it.</p><p>Or, alternatively,</p><p><span class="u">Change One Thing, Change Everything</span></p><p>Ironically, not a story (entirely) about Vriska.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Vriska Gets What She Wants

“Fly, Pupa! Flyyyyyyyy!”

For a moment, he can almost believe it. (No he can’t.) The air rushes past him, exhilarating and clear (oh god oh god oh god why oh god), caressing his face and ruffling his hair lovingly. (It slashes at him, cold and merciless) In a moment, he’ll pull out of his dive and swoop into the sky (he’s going to land and he’s going to die oh man oh god), and then he’ll wipe that terrible, mad grin off of her face. (She cackles behind him. She got her way, and so what if she had to cheat?)

Something slams against him from below and he hears an loud, ugly, wet crunch.

The pain rolls over him. His legs don’t burn. “Burn” doesn’t even begin to describe the churning, red hot, furious, agony coursing up from the twisted ruins of his leg benders and his splintered bones.

To his credit, he only screams once. It’s one hell of a scream, though, loud and genuine and full of uncomprehending fear and pain, and it takes forever to wind its way out of his chest.

He finishes it, and for a few moments, he simply lies there, whimpering and mewling. Head hazy with pain, it takes him several tries to retrieve his iGrub from his sylladex. He tries contacting his friends but, as before, they don’t respond (except one, who only pays attention long enough to mock and belittle him, as always).

And so he does it himself. Hand over hand, he drags himself across the beach and up one of the less steep areas of the cliff face, leaving smudges of brown behind from his shredded fingers and torn palms. The journey takes a small eternity and, somewhere amidst the exhaustion and the scrape of raw flesh against hard, jagged rock, it clicks (or perhaps snaps). _This is the reward for weakness,_ he realizes. _You wanted to join your friends, to truly understand them and fight alongside them, but they are strong and you are weak._

And so, he decides that he must make himself strong.

\---

His legs heal as quickly as could reasonably be expected, but he still fumes at the weeks spent uselessly in his hive. Aradia gets him a four wheeled device with which he might transport himself, but he sees it for what it is: a consolation prize for having failed so miserably. Instead, he proposes a more radical solution. She initially refuses, but he cajoles and begs and argues and eventually she gives in.

Together, they prepare for the operation: she gathers supplies, while he does research on proper technique and procedure. Finally, when she can’t delay it any longer, she comes to visit him. They make sure that everything is in order and, with infinite care, she breaks his legs again.

Following the advice of the voices whispering in her head and the medicinal texts collected on his computer, she straightens and realigns his improperly healed bones and joints. He does his best to endure the procedure stoically, but despite the painkiller they scrounged up and his own sincere desire to not inflict his own discomfort on her, he can’t stop himself from twitching as she twists his right leg bender a few degrees clockwise or whimpering as she pushes his foot manipulating joints back into the proper alignment.

He sleeps for the greater part of five days after the operation, emerging from his recuperacoon only to eat and clean himself as best he can. She visits him on the sixth day, bearing food and a grim expression. The voices, she explains to him, have told her that her corrections were not quite enough, and that if she allows his legs to mend now, he’ll never fully regain their use. He agrees without even a second of hesitation. Anything to get his legs back, to get a chance to make himself strong.

The second operation is much quicker and much simpler than the first, but they don’t have any painkiller this time. After the first attempted correction, she has to immobilize him completely to prevent him from ruining her efforts. His muscles flex and twitch uselessly in her steely grasp. Ragged screams interrupt his sobs of agony whenever she nudges a bone or tweaks a ligament back into their proper places. Muddy brown tears flow freely down his cheeks, matched by the rusty red staining her face and her clothes, but still she works, her face set in a tortured, stubborn grimace as her friend howls and gasps and pleads for mercy.

\---

When he wakes, she is still there, sitting beside him with a look of quiet, ferocious satisfaction on her face. She informs him that she has evened the scores, with a little help from her voices. He just nods, but on the inside, he wonders what she could possibly have done to repay the ordeals he went through and was forced to inflict on her.

His computer pings and she glances over towards it, raising her eyebrows in surprise. She goes to check the screen, leans in to type a few things, then straightens again and starts towards the door of his hive. On an impulse, he reaches out and grabs her arm, demanding an explanation. Slightly flustered, she hesitates. That hesitation saves them both.

The world outside turns blue and red. Twin beams of blinding light, too bright to have any appreciable color, scythe through the hive, blowing apart the door that Aradia would have exited through. Above the rumbling creak as the hive, having just lost several crucial supports, begins to collapse, Tavros can hear someone screaming in something that could be either agony or ecstasy. His friend manages to drag him off of the table and most of the way out of the hive before a large chunk of wood breaks away from a drunkenly tilting wall and slams her to the ground.

Unable to aid her or even abscond and save himself, he watches helplessly as the hive collapses around him.

\---

They survive, but only barely. After he finishes flipping his lid, Sollux manages to locate them among the rubble and ferry them to safety. He does his level best for them, but Aradia ends up needing the pulped remains of her left arm amputated and, well, the less said about her eye, the better.

Tavros gets off slightly lighter, merely suffering severe bruising across most of his body and requiring yet another correctional session to re-realign the bones in his legs. They salvage what they can from the ruins of his hive, but ultimately, there isn’t nearly enough to rebuild from, even if they could enlist the help of a carpenter drone or two. Aradia takes him in while his legs heal, and recruits Sollux to help care for her patient.

Recovery comes slowly. For the first few days, Tavros has to rely on his hostess and her sorta-kinda-maybe-matesprit for even the most trivial of tasks. Days turn to perigees, and he quickly masters the use of his four wheeled device (ironically, one of the few things to survive the destruction of his hive). Perigees turn to seasons, and his arms grow strong and limber from the continuous exercise.

Then, 138 meticulously counted days after the destruction of his hive, Tavros lifts himself from his four wheeled device and takes a few, faltering steps.

Of course, he falls on his face moments later, and the joy of success instantly crumples under the humiliation of being himself. Still, Aradia praises him and she helps him back to his four wheeled device (rather than lifting him up wholesale, as she’d had to do before). It’s progress.

\---

He doesn’t train. Training is what FLARPers do to learn fancy, impractical techniques for their silly girl-games.

He practices. He practices the same strikes and parries and dodges hundreds of times each day, both mounted and on foot. He practices running, climbing, and swimming, strengthening his body and teaching his mind to ignore the agonized burn of overexerted muscle. He practices enduring cold and heat and sleep deprivation, pushing himself beyond the weakness of his ashen flesh and muddy blood. He practices and practices and practices until he cannot practice anymore, and then he only stops briefly to rest so that he can begin practicing again.

Once he grows strong enough, he goes out into the wilderness to practice, killing what he can and mentally fending off what he cannot. Each day, the latter category grows smaller, and he calmly rejoices in every new beast slain.

He does not notice as the curiosity in his friends’ eyes at the end of each day turns to mild concern, then full-fledged worry, and eventually even well-concealed fear. He does not notice as the stammer disappears from his voice, worn down by thousand of hours of terrifying violence and washed away by rainbow seas of blood. The only thing he considers is how far he is from reaching his goal, and he drags himself towards it with complete focus, not noticing what gets scraped off along the way.

\---

He cripples her lusus first, holding it in place with his mind and running his lance through each of its eight legs at the joints. He scrawls a challenge across the cliff-face below her home in its blue blood and retreats into the wilderness to wait. She’ll come, he knows it.

\---

He picks the posse apart from a distance, one troll at a time. A furiously bellowing tuskbeast gores a teal blood before her companions can bring it down. A hungry subjugglator follows a hopbeast off of the path only to tumble into the den of an impossibly large trapdoor spider. A pair of cyan bloods break away from the group to chase what appears to be a mounted troll, only to die at the hooves of the enraged musclebeast and its herd. Eventually, only a single blue blood remains.

He challenges her, and with an arrogant laugh, she accepts.

It shouldn’t be a close fight, but it is. He escapes giant blue guillotines and dodges gouts of aquamarine fire and outmaneuvers swarms of nightmarish, navy blue beetle-constructs, just barely avoiding death with each roll of the dice. Again and again, she reaches out for his mind, only to find herself grasping at a tangle of bestial minds, all too base and primal for her too control. Even in the few times she does manage to grip at his mind, the all-consuming fury within it burns her and forces her to pull away.

Incredibly, impossibly, she loses, his lance glancing off her hand with just enough force to send her dice spinning away into the under growth and his leg catching her her knee in just the right manner to send her tumbling to the ground. Once more, she laughs and grins up at him, mind filled with images of terrible, obsidian-dark romance.

Too late, she sees the true, mad depths of hatred in his eyes.

\---

They meet again, the Page of Rage and the Thief of Time, in the Land of Sand and Fire, her in a body of shining steel, him attended by the Maid of Light. Again they fight, but this time, he somehow cannot bring himself to summon the wrath needed to defeat his opponent. In thanks, she beats him to within an inch of his life, breaking his arms and legs as he broke her blackened heart. Only the Maid’s intervention stays her hand, and even then only barely.

\---   
He perches on the edge of his tower on Prospit, awaiting his demise in furious silence. As he begins to fade away, he screams in purest Rage, defiant of whatever end awaits.

\---

The scream carries across the Battlefield, and Dersite and Prospitian alike stop in momentary terror to behold its source. The winged figure hovers above them all, purple-garbed except for the four irregular, black lines marking his chest like gouges from some huge, hideous claw. Then, for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, he laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thanks for reading!


End file.
